


No Sense of Ethics Whatsoever

by Josselin



Category: Sanctuary (TV), Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-13
Updated: 2010-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-03 15:06:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/382711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Josselin/pseuds/Josselin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Not here," Nikola told him, waving a lazy arm about the library. "This isn't an appropriate place for...that sort of thing."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last November for NaNoWriMo, and it did not have enough compelling plot to get me to 50,000 words (it's only 15,000ish). So I turned to other things during NaNo, and kind of forgot about this entirely, until I thought of it today, reread it, and found it far more enjoyable than I remembered.
> 
> I toyed with the idea of posting it, back and forth, with the main reason not to post being that I don't think there are that many readers for Sanctuary/Torchwood fusions out there, and even if there are, I don't know how on earth they would find my journal.
> 
> But then I decided that if someone else were holding back 15,000 words of Sanctuary/Torchwood fusion on their hard drive, I would be emphatically in favor of them posting it, so...

It was different than it had been before.

In some ways, the thoughts were the same, when he saw a woman and his eyes started to linger on her neck too long when they should have drifted upwards or downwards. But previously, he remembered being so angry with Helen, who hadn't understood, when she ought to have understood everything, ought to have known what had been going to happen and to comprehend it as it was going on. But she hadn't understood, and she had always been arguing with him about what had been right and wrong and proper--and he'd thought that when he'd fallen in love with her she hadn't been half as concerned about those things--and he would go out walking even though he knew how it would end.

In some ways, he knew that he had just been waiting for Helen to find out.

It wasn't so much about Helen now, except in the way that everything for John was about Helen and would always be about Helen, but the feelings he had now were about Ashley. Women he passed would remind him of her in one way or another, or he would be reminded of her simply by the fact that the woman he passed resembled Ashley in no way whatsoever. And then eventually one of these observations would infuriate him, because these women were alive and Ashley was not, or these women were laughing and Ashley was not, or these women had fathers and husbands and lovers and children and Ashley did not, or any of a dozen other injustices.

Ashley had been a great injustice, one of the universe's cruel jokes. Her very existence, cursed with his blood, and then, once she was taunted with life, the fact that it was ripped away from her. He thought about Ashley a great deal.

But in some way, this time he was not waiting for Helen to find out. And he had no doubt that she would, eventually, even if he had managed to avoid her of late. So instead, he sought out Nikola Tesla.  
Nikola had gone back to Helen himself after Nikola had grown bored of hunting down cabal agents with John. He'd amused himself as a lapdog in her laboratory for a month or so before he grew bored of that as well, or quarreled with Helen, or perhaps both, and John wasn't sure exactly how Nikola had been occupying himself since that time. Helen would have known where he was, because Helen kept track of that sort of thing.

But John was avoiding Helen, so asking after Nikola at one of her Sanctuaries was not an option he pursued. He had his own history with Nikola, though, and sometimes he could make guesses about Nikola that Helen would never have made and Watson may not have even managed.

The guess wasn't hard, in this case, and it was easy enough to find Nikola in one of the libraries at Bhalasaam. He wondered why Nikola, with his distaste for dirt and savagery, had not simply had the library moved to some other location where he could examine it in relative luxury at his leisure. But Nikola had his peculiarities as they all did--Nikola had perhaps more than some--and he liked more than anything to feel close to his forefathers. Perhaps he liked the ruins for that reason.

They reminded John of Watson, who they had buried outside the tunnels, in the sunshine and shadow of one of the greater mountains, on what Helen's protégé had announced had used to be a central park of some sort. Sometimes he had felt like Watson was his last hope, but Watson had failed him.

So he was looking for Nikola Tesla, but he found someone else.  
When Nikola returned to where John had expected to find him, in the library, he was extremely angry.

"Druitt!" Nikola took in the scene and John could sense the extent of his anger by the fact that he was wearing his vampire face. "You've ruined my experiment!" He swiped at John, and he was almost fast enough to catch John across the stomach the way John had captured the woman, except that John needed a knife and Nikola only had to dirty his hands.

"Nikola," John said in greeting.

"Months of work!" Nikola said, trying to swipe at him again, and John jumped across the room to get out of range.

"Nikola, I need your help," John told him.

"Help you?" Nikola hissed. "I ought to kill you for what you've done. You've set me back almost a year, destroyed a work in progress that will be exceedingly difficult for me to replace--" Nikola had stopped actively trying to hit John and in the middle of his rant began gesturing angrily at the corpse on the floor.

Suddenly he rounded at John, having been struck with a new idea. "Have you become her lapdog again? Because if Helen can't even be bothered to come herself, then I hardly care what she thinks, and I am not at all convinced she's going to approve of your method of dealing with the situation." Nikola regarded him for a moment. "How did she find out, anyway?"

"Helen didn't send me," John told him.

Nikola appeared unconvinced, but he had dropped out of his vampire face and was now wiping off his hands with his handkerchief. "And why are you here, then, ruining my experiments and disrupting my work, if not for some moral pang of Helen's conscience."

"I need your help." John told him again.

"Did you at least bring wine?" Nikola asked. "I tried to pay a [word for Himalayan native courier-type] to bring me a steady supply, but he either took my coin and deserted his end of the bargain, or he didn't understand what I was saying in the first place.”

"I need you to do it again."

"What are you talking about?" Nikola asked. "Have you found another member of the cabal? Because I thought what we did in Venice had flair, to be sure--"

"The electroshock therapy," John said. "I need you to do it again."

Nikola actually stopped talking for a moment. Then he turned his head and took in the scene on the floor once again.

Not knowing what to say, John continued repeating himself. "It's...worn off. I need you to do it again."

A variety of expressions crossed Nikola's face. Comprehension as he followed what John was talking about, a predatory look as he internally considered how much John needed this and what he might be willing to bargain for it, and a reflective and thoughtful look that John was coming to realize Nikola had when he thought of Helen. John wondered if his own expression were ever so revealing--he doubted it.

Nikola rose from his chair and set his pen down on a sheaf of papers he had been using for notations. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped off his pen hand carefully as he considered.

"All right," Nikola said finally, adjusting his tie. "I shall require your assistance with one of my own projects."

John simply nodded. Nikola was not the sort to help when he had nothing of his own to gain, and at this point, John was willing to trade a future favor--even one from someone so mercurial as Nikola--for the uninterrupted peace of all the girls whose eyes reminded him of Ashley.

Nikola approached from across the room. He didn't seem to have anything with him besides his clothes and his pen and notes. A part of John's mind--the Watson part--wondered if Nikola was living in the ruins themselves, or if he lived nearby in a village (and how unlike Nikola it would be to live in a Himalayan village), and in either case, how he managed to come by a pressed cravat every day. Perhaps he had some invention that managed that--Nikola and Watson were always coming up with such things, devices to butter one's toast or mend a button, and Helen had sometimes despaired of them ever focusing on larger problems, problems that she felt were more worth solving.

Everyone was shortsighted in his or her own way.

The other part of John's mind, that wasn't wondering on Nikola's current lodgings, was watching him approach from across the library.

"Not here," Nikola told him, waving a lazy arm about the library. "This isn't an appropriate place for...that sort of thing." He came close enough and John obligingly wrapped an arm around him. For this, they would go somewhere else.

***

Nikola may have been a useful physician, but he had the bedside manner of Josef Mengele. He was not at all sympathetic to the pain of others, whined about his own misfortunes even when others were clearly in greater suffering, and in fact seemed to take a perverse joy in being the cause of John's agony.

John was prepared to tolerate it if it had the desired effect. He had, after all, lost his taste for the sport. 

They were at an old hideout of Nikola's in Buda. The flat was on the second floor of a nineteenth century brick building, and had one bedroom and one bed. Nikola was graciously letting John use it, in deference to his physical condition and the fact that Nikola himself did not require sleep.

They had done the actual treatments on the tiled floor of the bathroom. John had had a vain hope that it might better this time, since he wasn’t starting out half weakened from Helen’s drug and he and Nikola weren’t fighting first. It was hard not to fight, though, hard to watch Nikola settle his hand on John’s chest and just wait for it, when he knew what was coming.

The flat was close to the Lukacs baths, which of course Nikola would never visit, having been phobic of germs before other scientists had even discovered their existence, and long before the modern trends of soaps and sanitizers and cleansers and disinfectants. They had been in Hungary almost a week now since John's treatments, and John would probably have been able to have been left on his own by this point, but Nikola made no motions toward leaving or moving or kicking John out. He left the flat frequently, though, and sometimes John suspected that he was hunting in the wooded hills, and other times he returned with bottles of wine or books or irate with stories about the foolishness of some lecturer they were considering for the EIT or the general populace or the tourists crowding over Margit Bridge.

Occasionally Nikola would think to bring John some food--a sandwich from a shop or a piece of fruit or a bottle of liquor. John was beginning to think he might be strong enough to go out for an evening meal that day--and that if he did not he might in fact begin to grow weaker, rather than stronger, due to hunger. He asked Nikola if Nikola would like to accompany him. Nikola accepted for reasons that John did not understand--Nikola often did things for those reasons--and the two of them walked down the street to a cafe on Frankel Leo Ut. They walked past four men and three women (two couples, and two men talking together such as Nikola and John, and one solitary woman). John carefully did not regard any of the women. Nikola appeared oblivious.

Nikola spoke Hungarian, interspersing phrases and commentary in his speech and ignoring the fact that that made it half incomprehensible to John. Nikola was often half-incomprehensible, though, because even if he was not speaking in Hungarian he was using technical terms or Latin or other words that John did not follow. Nikola translated John's order to the waiter, and when the waiter showed up with ale and a hearty stew for him and a bottle and wine glass for Nikola, John dug in with relish.

Graciously, Nikola waited until John was mostly finished to tell John about his new plan.

***

On Monday, a strange man arrived at the front door.

That in and of itself wasn't so unusual for the Sanctuary. Ianto functioned as something of a tourist office, sometimes, because strangers often wandered onto the unusual property wondering about the architecture or the grounds, and Ianto would explain to them very politely that this was a private residence, and he'd offer them a few tidbits about the type of carvings on the [architectural feature] as he escorted them off of the property and directed them over to the museum three blocks over.

Aside from enterprising or misguided tourists, they had other visitors to the Sanctuary--old friends of Helen's, colleagues from other locations across the globe, visiting researchers working on a project or paper, and of course, refugees. Refugees didn't always show up at the front door--often then came in the back way, tucked in a net or a crate--but sometimes they knew of the Sanctuary and made their way there when something had happened to their homes or their neighbors or their friends or their families.

Ianto was appropriately hospitable to all of the Sanctuary's guests; that was the largest portion of his job. He welcomed them in and led them to the most comfortable sitting room for their species, native climate, or state of mind, and then he alerted Helen or one of her current protégés that they were waiting for an audience. When humans or abnormals were staying overnight, he prepared quarters for them, again based on their particular needs.

Ianto helped everyone who visited, but no one visited the Sanctuary to see Ianto. 

No one, until the stranger. 

Ianto greeted him as he would any visitor, internally wondering what brought this visitor to his door front. "Good afternoon, sir," Ianto said evenly.   

"Oh, thank God, it's you," the stranger said.  

"Pardon?" Ianto said.  

"Ianto Jones, you wouldn't not believe how many universes I've been through looking for you." The man reminded Ianto something of Helen, with his slightly anachronistic dress and carriage and habits, and an accent that wasn't local but was impossible to place exactly. He was very handsome and he was smiling broadly at Ianto with relief.  

"I'm sorry," Ianto blinked. "Have we met?"  

"Yes," the stranger told him, though Ianto felt quite sure that they had not, as he recalled no such previous encounter.

The man took a step closer to Ianto on the front porch, which caused Ianto himself to take a nervous half step back. The man smelled rather good, and Ianto was dangerously close to blurting that fact out to the man himself. He made an effort to gather himself together.  

"Is there something with which I could assist you?" He tried, wondering if he should try to reach his hand over to the security button next to the door. The man didn't seem dangerous, exactly, but they had had other security problems that had started out seeming entirely harmless and even less strange.  

"Oh, Ianto," the man said, as though they were intimate enough to use each other's first names fondly.  
"I've missed those beautiful Welsh vowels."  

"And you are?" Ianto prompted.

 "Captain Jack Harkness, at your service," Harkness saluted.  

"Captain," Ianto nodded.  

"Ianto Jones," Harkness nodded in response.  

"Captain, is there something with which I could assist you?" Ianto asked again.  

"Yes," Harkness said definitively, smiling broadly again. "Come out to dinner with me tonight."  

"Come again?" Ianto said, confused.  

"Dinner," Harkness said, "A dinner date, to be precise."    
"Me?" Ianto said, slowly.  

"You," Harkness confirmed. "You, me, dinner, tonight." He smiled, insouciant. "Please?"  

Ianto didn't know what to make of this latest development. "Remind me how you know my name, again?" he said.  

"Come out to dinner with me and I'll tell you," Harkness said persuasively.  

Ianto remained skeptical and it probably showed on his face. "I don't really go out to dinner," he told Harkness. But instead of seeming rebuffed, the man just laughed.  

"I know," Harkness told him. "But you should make an exception for me." He seemed to sense that Ianto's resolve was weakening, or Ianto's curiosity was getting the better of him, or something. "I'll come to pick you up at seven," he promised. He turned and started down the steps, then swirled around, his coat flying behind him. "Wear a nice suit," he directed Ianto in a final admonition, and then he dashed down the rest of the steps. Ianto watched him for a few minutes before retreating within the entry hall and closing the heavy wooden door of the main entrance behind him.

*** 

After Captain Jack Harkness had left the Sanctuary--and Ianto had checked the network of security footage to make sure that the Captain had indeed left the premises--Ianto began his investigation. He didn't think of himself as a man so far gone that he did background investigations on any man who asked him out on a date, but to be fair, the situation hadn't actually arisen before.  
The nature of his work didn't exactly lend itself to a social life. He justified his investigation to himself by the oddness of Harkness's arrival and the peculiar fact that he already seemed familiar with Ianto--or at least his name, workplace and accent.  

Captain Jack Harkness was not a living American citizen according to the FBI database to which Henry kept them connected. He was neither a living citizen of the European Union. Ianto broadened his search to include citizens deceased in the past fifty years--in case Harkness was hiding under an assumed identity or had been recently erroneously marked as deceased--and his search was still fruitless.

He radioed Henry to consult with their security expert on what it might mean if a search on a name turned up no results, and then tried variant spellings and partial name searches until Henry suggested that if the man happened to be a CIA agent or classified military operative that his record might have been scrubbed from existence, to protect his work and his existence.  

After tea, he mentioned the visitor to Helen in his usual report of the days happenings. She didn't recognize the name Captain Jack Harkness either. "Why did he say he was calling?" she asked Ianto.  

"To ask me out to dinner, actually, ma'am," Ianto answered.  

There was a bit of matchmaker in all women, and she grinned like a school girl. "Truly?" she said, then seemed to realize that Ianto might construe that at insulting, and quickly continued. "Have you met him before? How did he know to find you here?"  

"He claimed that we were previously acquainted, ma'am," Ianto answered, "But I don't recall having met him before." Helen had brought up a picture of Captain Jack Harkness from the security footage and was inspecting it carefully.   

"He seems like the sort of man one wouldn't easily forget," she commented, and Ianto thought that she might be blushing even a little bit. "Well?" she said finally. "Are you going to go?"  

Ianto shrugged uncomfortably. "I'm not sure," he said hesitantly. "I suppose it would be good to collect more information on how he came to be aware of the Sanctuary's location--"  

"Oh, forget that rubbish for a moment," Helen told him, smiling. "A gorgeous man has asked you out to dinner. Are you going to accept?"  

Ianto ducked his head but nodded a little bit.

Helen clapped her hands together approvingly. "This is exciting, Ianto," she told him. "We haven't had a Sanctuary romance since--" her face clouded slightly. "Well, anyway, it has been quite a while, and it would be nice to have a pleasant diversion. I hope you have a wonderful time, and if he gives you any trouble, you can call here and we'll send assistance right away."  

Ianto thanked her for the offer of assistance and assured her that he wouldn't be needing it.  

He didn't know where Harkness was going to take him for dinner, and his flat was too far to go home simply to change before seven, so he would have to go wearing the suit he'd worn that morning to work. Ianto took pride in his appearance, in matching his attire to the general tenor of the Sanctuary building and decor, to creating the correct impression of seriousness on visitors and guests. He looked at himself in the mirror for a few minutes, wondered what Harkness had seen earlier that morning and how the man had seemed to have known him when Ianto had no memory of having ever seen him before, and then he was distracted by a call from Henry for assistance in the archives, and he was caught up again in work until it was seven o'clock.  

Ianto had never intended to spend five years of his life working as general admin for a research facility specializing in genetic abnormalities. He'd majored in history, after all. But he'd come to Old City on a trip after university with some mates, and after having inadvertently stumbled on the retrieval of a [name of dangerous abnormal creature] in the Fountain Park by the river walk, he suddenly found that he could no longer content himself with going back to working as a research intern assistant at the museum.

He'd gone back to pack up some of his belongings and to try to explain things to his sister Rhiannon--who hadn't really understood at all and kept wondering if he'd met someone in America.

He had met someone, but it would be impossible to explain what it had meant to meet Helen Magnus to Rhiannon when Ianto could hardly explain it to himself. Five years later he still didn't really have an explanation, but he didn't really talk to Rhiannon any longer, either, or to anyone outside of the Sanctuary, really, so he didn't need an explanation any longer. Those who were already part of the Sanctuary already understood. Those who weren't part of it weren't around long enough to matter.  

Captain Jack Harkness picked Ianto up for dinner at seven o'clock sharp. He rapped quickly on the door again, and Helen answered it this time. She still had a bit of girlish joy in her face at the prospect of Ianto's date. Ianto was glad to see her show joy at anything again--it didn't happen frequently, after Ashley--but he did wish it weren't at his expense.

She shook hands with Harkness and smiled in a friendly manner at him. Both of them seemed amiable enough, but there was an underlying tension in the encounter as they sized each other up.   

Ianto slipped into his overcoat and bid Helen goodnight.  

"Goodnight, Ianto," she said fondly, and kissed him on the cheek, which she had never done before and seemed to be doing now only as a blatant message to Harkness, who had narrowed his eyes at her in response. Message received.  

Once the heavy oak door closed behind them, Harkness offered Ianto his arm gallantly. He was full of chivalrous, anachronistic, and over-the-top courtly gestures, from opening doors to pull back Ianto's seat at the restaurant.

Captain Jack Harkness was remarkably adept at not revealing things about himself. He was full of opinions and happy to talk about them--he hated green beans, he loved the color of their waitress's dress--but he didn't have opinions about things of significance, and he didn't let slip the sorts of people that other people tended to reveal in conversation that gave away where they were from, how they had grown up, and what they did for work.   

Harkness even dodged direct questions about himself. When Ianto asked if he had grown up in the states, then, after Harkness recounted an amusing anecdote set in New York, Harkness had smiled disarmingly and said, "Not near New York," and shifted the subject. When Ianto asked Harkness what he did for work, Harkness told Ianto that he was a freelance consultant at the moment--which could mean anything, really--but he said all these things in a way that didn't invite further questions.  

And during dessert, when Ianto asked Harkness how he had come to know these things about Ianto--his name and where he worked and so on--when Ianto himself didn't remember having met Harkness previously, Harkness's face became slightly shadowed and he said it was a long story.  

"I don't want you to think I'm keeping it from you, because I'm not," Harkness said earnestly, "because I don't want there to be any secrets between us, Ianto," something in his tone had a vague implication of 'this time', "But the whole story is long and painful and today I'm just happy that I found you and you're here and I'm sitting across from you having delicious dulce de leche ice cream, and could we maybe talk about the hard things tomorrow?"  

Ianto had intended to press Harkness at dinner to explain himself, but he found himself succumbing to Harkness's non-answers to all of his questions, and after dinner, he found himself succumbing to Harkness's deep kiss outside his apartment, as well.

On their third date, which had ended just like the two before it--in Ianto's bed underneath the quilt his grandmother had sewn for him--Ianto made a comment and Jack actually gave him an answer. Ianto had stopped expecting Jack to say anything real by the third date, but he went out with Harkness again because...well, because the man was good looking and amazing in bed and kept showing up to take him out to dinner.

So when Jack had smiled and said, "It's good, yeah?"

Ianto had responded sleepily in the affirmative, adding, "It's as though you know exactly what I like best."

"I do," Jack responded, and Ianto responded to the sudden tension in Jack's body and was suddenly far away from sleep even though he'd previously already half drifted off.

"Yes?" Ianto prompted Jack to continue.

"I don't want you to think that I'm some sort of psycho stalker or something," Jack told him, seriously.

"I pretty much already think that," Ianto assured him.

Jack barked a short laugh. "Well, in that case," he joked, but quickly became serious again. "I...I suppose I really am a psycho stalker," he told Ianto.

"What do you mean?" Ianto said.

"I'm from another universe," Jack told him. He blurted it out quickly, as though he expected Ianto to interrupt and Jack wanted to get it all out. But Ianto was accustomed to hearing this sort of statement, though admittedly usually at work and not in bed.

"You're from another universe," Ianto echoed.

Harkness nodded. "And I knew you, in my universe--"

"Knew?" Ianto said sharply, and Harkness winced and didn't meet Ianto's eyes.

"Yes. You died," Harkness said shortly. "But I knew you, we were--you called me your boyfriend," at this Jack met his eyes again, briefly. "And you died, and I couldn't get you back, and I couldn't do it anymore, and I had to leave, so I looked for you, I searched through twenty-three separate universes before I found one where you weren't Torchwood and had never been Torchwood, because we really do have a longevity issue there, and then I came here, and I looked you up and I knocked on the door and you were there, and I had found you, and..." he trailed off, seeming to not know what to say next.

"And you asked me out to dinner," Ianto concluded.

"And I asked you out to dinner," Harkness agreed.

"Without mentioning that you were lovers with a dead me from another universe."

Harkness winced again. "Somehow I didn't think that was the right line--"

"You know what this means," Ianto told him.

"You're kicking me out of bed?" Jack said, but Ianto had no plans of doing that, especially seeing as he'd apparently already broken Jack in.

"You have to come meet my boss," Ianto told him, and then he did drift off to sleep.

***

There were forty-seven employees on the roster at the Old City Sanctuary, but only some small subset of them were ever on duty at any given time. Four of them were actually MIA and presumed dead but remained on the roster nonetheless. There was the core staff who were always there, and then there were a large quantity of consultants and part-time associates that they called in for a job or two or when they needed an extra hand.

On the day Ianto took Captain Jack Harkness to meet with Helen Magnus, they encountered no less than four Sanctuary staff on their way in, all of whom had heard about Ianto's new mystery beau and were anxious to be introduced, and with all of whom Harkness flirted. He did not seem to be limited by either sex or species.

Helen had briefly met Harkness previously on two occasions, when Harkness had picked Ianto up from work and Helen had been sure to see him to the door and bid him farewell. But Helen understood that this was to be a different kind of meeting, if Ianto were to bring Jack into the Sanctuary, because there were a great many questions to be answered differently if one had seen the inside than if one had been halted on the front steps. This was why one of Ianto's usual duties was to keep visitors from coming any farther than the door.

Ianto felt that visitors from another universe were an exception.

He had other clues that Harkness was abnormal, as well, and possible an abnormal, though Helen would be in a much better position to judge that than Ianto himself. But there was something about Harkness that just seemed a bit off, and once he had revealed to Ianto that he was dead Ianto's lover from another universe, Harkness seemed to have lost many of his filters and now casually dropped other things into conversation that seemed to reveal great age and familiarity with other species.

Harkness flirted with Helen as well, and Helen flirted back, and Ianto tried to look attentive and not peevish, and wondered if the whole interview might have gone better if he'd worn the navy suit, instead.

Conveniently--and even after having worked there for four years Ianto wasn't sure if Helen orchestrated these things or they just always happened this way--a "situation" arose during their interview, and Helen invited Harkness to accompany her and Will while they "dealt with it" and Harkness agreed, and all three of them knew that this was a test.

Harkness passed.

Ianto didn't go out into the field himself, but he had his ways to keep tabs on what was going on with the field agents, and he kept his radio in while he fed some of the plants on the third level so he wasn't surprised when Helen and Harkness returned discussing him assisting with some of their cases on an ongoing basis.

"I'm only doing it so you'll let me stick around," Harkness told Ianto later.

Ianto had to some extent suggested it for the same reason, so he didn't respond. He found that many of Jack's comments passed better unremarked upon.

"I know you'd get tired of me if I just lazed around your apartment," Harkness said. "But I could do fifties housewife pretty well," he continued. "What with the heels and a nice dress and making cocktails so you could come home and put your feet up before dinner."

"I'm not big on heels," Ianto told him, and that was enough to distract Jack from the subject of his new employment.

So Ianto had gone from being a bachelor to being essentially married in a matter of weeks. Their relationship was made more serious by the fact that Jack had already known Ianto for years and was clearly besotted, and by the fact that Ianto had no previous social life and was able to reorganize his life with Jack in the center of it, at work and at home.

Things continued in that fashion for two months, and come Christmas, Ianto mentioned in his letter to his sister that he was seeing someone. He figured the fact that he was seeing a man could wait until the following Christmas's letter.

***

What concerned John the most about Nikola's latest plot was what Nikola clearly wasn't telling John about it.

Nikola had a long history of questionable plots. Most of them were preposterous and deadly weapon designs, but John could recall at least one that involved a Colossus-sized statue of Nikola himself and another that culminated in boiling the oceans to fuel a rocket ship that would carry life on earth to a better world across the galaxy.

This list of Nikola’s plots that went well—achieved their desired ends without fatalities—was far shorter.

Nikola told John about this plan in separate bits of conversation punctuated by Nikola’s discussions in Hungarian with their waiter about Nikola’s wine, which John was gathering from Nikola’s tone did not meet Nikola’s expectations.

“I have the genetic samples ready for phase two,” Nikola told him, “but another subject for incubation shall be required. I procured the first subject from the village near [location], but upon reflection, I’m not sure that was the best strategy.”

He took a sip of the third glass the waiter had brought him, winced faintly, took a larger sip, and continued. “Your interference with my experiment notwithstanding, I think the first subject may not have been strong enough for the duration.”

Nikola paused to translate the waiter’s question about whether John was interested in any dessert. John declined, and Nikola continued. “I believe this experiment will require an abnormal subject for incubation, to suit the abnormal properties of the tissue to be incubated.”

***

John had stolen some security footage from the Sanctuary back when Helen had still been willing to let him hang around. It wasn't compromising information, or video that made him a pervert to watch it over and over and over again. It was simply the only pictures of Ashley he had ever had, a sad supplement to only a few hours of memory. He had video of her training in the gym, practicing with various weapons and against various dummies. He had a video of a younger Ashley simply walking through the hallway with a school bag on her back, humming something to herself. There was a video of her eating dinner with Helen--they had curry--and one of her riding a motorbike.

He tried to know her through these soundless pictures, and of course it was futile, but he couldn't bring himself to stop trying or stop watching them. He analyzed her stance doing a kata and imagined the suggestions he might have made to her on fighting technique, never mind that she had clearly bested him in the end. He wondered if he had been a better man, somehow, if he might have been there eating dinner with Helen and Ashley together, if everything could have been different like that. He wasn't a geneticist like Helen was, or even as Nikola had become, once weaponry had evolved past being question of impact and explosives into a question of biology and terrorism, but he was a father, and he noticed how Ashley had Helen's eyes and his interests, how she had oddly ended up with neither of their heights.

He wished he could have had a whole lifetime of knowing Ashley, carefully bounding his wish with the limitation that somehow Ashley would not have had a whole lifetime of knowing him. He didn't want to think about his weaknesses polluting her blood, or about his failures as a man tainting her childhood. It was better the way that Helen had chosen it.

So while John was mourning his daughter and somewhat guiltily concluding that it was probably better that she was gone, Nikola had apparently decided he owed it to the world to reproduce.

***

Over the years, John had ended up knowing a great many things about Nikola Tesla.

Nikola loved to talk about himself, but John wasn't the type of man to give much credence to Nikola's speeches about himself. John was an observant man, but his observations were limited to the kind of things that he could understand. John could tell if Nikola was likely to strike him and how hard, he could tell an instant before Nikola's fangs appeared or before Nikola threw a wine bottle at the wall. He could tell when Nikola entered a room and when he left it, when Nikola was taking his medication and when he forgot.

But much of what John knew about Nikola was information he had learned from other people.

John didn't notice things the way Watson did, and Nikola didn't confess things to him the way Nikola did to Helen, so the things that he knew about Nikola's secret worries or insecurities or peculiarities were usually things that he had either noticed after long exposure or that someone like Watson or Helen had explained to him.

Helen told him about Nikola's secret fears of never truly being loved, of ending up alone in the world, of his genuine frustration that ninety-nine percent of the world never understood him no matter how hard he tried, and of he how he valued the five because whatever else, they did actually understand him better than anyone else. Watson told him about Nikola's obsessive-compulsive habits years before anyone would have called them that. Watson was the one who pointed out that Nikola intentionally shocked people--like a tiny jolt of static electricity--because he was compulsively terrified of germs and attempting to disinfect them. Watson could tell when Nikola was genuinely thinking and when Nikola already knew the answer and was just drawing things out because he liked to be the center of attention, but Watson had usually been willing to indulge Nikola, whereas John would not have tolerated such shenanigans.

John didn't think that Nikola ever went to Watson with his vulnerable look, though. He had used to think that it had been something about Helen, that Nikola went to him because it was the closest he could truly get to Helen, and John had thought that he was simply taking advantage of Nikola's desperation. But more recently he had started to wonder--perhaps age was bringing wisdom to him at last--if it wasn't actually about Helen at all. If Nikola came to him because he liked to be held down, if he didn't just tolerate that to get a second-hand whiff of Helen's perfume. Because today, Nikola might have even been closer to Helen's good graces than John was, and perhaps had been so for years. And yet, Nikola still came to him.

Nikola liked to have his hands pinned, and though he was deathly afraid of other people’s hair (John did not have to worry about this particular problem)—and equally terrified of being mocked for his irrational fear—he enjoyed having his own hair played with by other people. He liked verbal appreciation, which John wasn’t much for. Nikola liked rough sex with everyone’s clothes still half on. He had a seemingly endless amount of energy and never lingered in the afterglow, drifting away to go back to some calculation on which he was working or experiment with which he was tinkering.

***

Once Nikola realized Jack Harkness’s unique talents, and how he was especially suited for the task of incubating Nikola’s latest experiment, the plan proceeded quickly. Nikola prepared another set of his samples. John materialized behind Jack on the balcony, knocked him unconscious with a single blow, and materialized both of them into Nikola’s laboratory. John carried Jack to Nikola’s autopsy table, and Nikola strapped Jack down in case he regained consciousness before the procedure was complete. John’s work was over at that point, and he simply observed as Nikola did scans, injected Harkness with various syringes, did more scans, and finally, implanted the cloned cells.

Harkness came to shortly after Nikola announced that the procedure was finished. Jack sucked in an enormous breath of air and then he shouted as he spotted John and Nikola. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

Nikola seemed to be ignoring him and was looking at one of the monitors on one of his scanners. “So far so good,” Nikola told John.

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked again. “What have you done to me?”

“Oh, don’t complain, it’s nothing that you haven’t done before,” Nikola told Jack.

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t find that reassurance particularly comforting,” Jack responded.

“My experiment requires the participation of someone with two unique skills that you possess.” Nikola informed Jack.

“And what might those two unique skills be?” Jack inquired.

“Immortality and a uterus,” Nikola said, seemingly distracted again by his scanner monitor.

“What?” Jack yelped, renewing his struggle to get free of how he was bound to the table. Nikola ignored him.

Jack turned his pleading look on John, seemingly having given up on Nikola. “You have to help me,” Jack told John. “Don’t you understand how crazy this is? You won’t be able to get away with this.” John was immune to pleading and looked back at Jack silently. After a moment, Jack’s pleas died off.

“Look,” Nikola said to John, and John obliging crossed the room to regard the monitor Nikola gestured at. “You can see the cells multiplying already.” The monitor showed a small grouping of bubbles, and the bubbles were slowly enlarging, and every few seconds one of them would split down the center into two separate bubbles. It seemed inconceivable to John that the bubbles could be the beginning of an actual human being, of a woman like Ashley, but it was almost better that way. He didn’t want to dwell too much on Nikola’s latest project. Helen was already going to kill both of them when she found out, and it was clearly only a matter of time. Harkness was her employee, if he just disappeared, she was going to become suspicious and she was going to look for him.

“What did you do?” Harkness demanded again, and this time, Nikola turned to answer him. Nikola had his excited tone on, the one that assumed that his listeners were going to have just as much appreciation for his genius as he expected.

“I’ve had difficulty growing a fetus with vampire genes in a human host,” Nikola told Jack, “because once the fetus reaches a certain stage of development, it will attempt to feed on the host, and it’s difficult for the host to sustain the necessary caloric intake to support both the growth of the fetus as well as the blood loss from the feeding process. But this will be ideal,” Nikola continued, gesturing at the ever expanding pack of bubbles on the monitor screen and then down at Jack’s abdomen, “because your enhanced stamina should be better able to support development, and I’ll be able to monitor the situation closely and provide additional nutrition and sustenance as required.”

“You are not going to use me to grow your vampire baby,” Harkness bellowed.

Nikola was beginning to look peeved that Jack wasn’t appreciation his scheme. “Oh, but I am,” he said.

 

 

 

After a few days, Jack had begun to resign himself to his captivity, or to pretend to resign himself to captivity and begin to strategize in his head about escape, or to pass the time while he waiting for rescue, or to distract his captors while he waited for rescue—for whatever reason, after a few days, Jack began to attempt to strike up conversations with John.

His first few attempts were not overly successful, because John wasn’t a particularly talkative man, especially with strangers and without the comfort of a glass of scotch.

At one point, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”

John supposed he could have answered that he owned Nikola a favor, which was true, but it wasn’t completely the truth, and he said, “My daughter died.”

The answer seemed to take Jack to someplace far away. “I have a daughter,’ he told John.

John said nothing.

Jack seemed to be feeling confessional. “She hates me, though.” John did not respond to that either, but Jack continued nonetheless. “She ought to. I sacrificed her son for all the children in the world.”

John reflected that it was no wonder that Jack and Helen got on, they seemed to have a great deal in common. Perhaps more than they knew.

“Was it worth it?” John inquired.

Jack didn’t answer, but he was crying. John fetched him a tissue from across the room and placed it in reach of Jack’s one untethered hand.

“What was her name?” Jack asked, tears still running unashamedly down his cheeks, but John wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.

Jack waited a moment for John to respond. Jack apparently was ready to talk about it, though, because once he realized that John was not going to say anything, he told John his own story, about Alice and Stephen and twelve other children.

 

Their next few conversations were not as serious in nature. Jack mentioned that the cell Nikola was keeping him in was somewhat lacking amenities, and John gave him an impassive look, and Jack pulled on some inhuman depths of optimism to tell John that he’d been kept prisoner in worse places, including a mining camp on [name of planet] as well as having to live through the twentieth century twice.

“The worst,” Jack told him, “is all those idiots running around who are nostalgic for it,” and that was true enough to get John to give a genuine laugh. Jack seemed somewhat surprised to have prompted a reaction, but he grinned in response. “The smell,” Jack offered.

“The grime everywhere,” John returned.

“The whole of London stank, was covered in inches of dirt, and when it rained it was like grease dripped from the sky,” Jack said, a faraway look in his eyes again.

John nodded his agreement. “Yes,” he said gravely.

“There were some good times,” Jack continued. “Where did you spend the sixties?” he asked.

“China,” John replied.

Jack made a face in response, and John nodded. If he had to live through the twentieth century again, he would not spend the sixties in China. It was a long story.

“That was a better time in London, anyway,” Jack said.

“Likely so,” John agreed.

They had other conversations about places that they had each traveled, or about London in various eras. John had little to occupy his time when Nikola wasn’t sending him on one errand or another, and Nikola seemed quite distracted by his laboratory at the moment.

However, Nikola wasn’t blind to the fact that Jack and John were striking up an odd sort of friendship, and he was jealous.

“Well, isn’t this a cozy scene,” Nikola drawled, coming into Jack’s room to find Jack gesturing excitedly in the middle of some elaborate story about the fifty-first century and John smiling indulgently as he listened.

John didn’t respond to Nikola’s observation, but he didn’t make any effort to rise from his position on Jack’s bed, either. Jack’s room/cell was sparsely furnished, and aside from the floor, the bed was the only place to sit.

“Have you come to let me out?” Jack asked Nikola.

“Hardly,” Nikola scoffed.

“Then why are you here?” Jack asked him. Nikola didn’t drop on Jack frequently himself, having set up all of his scans to function remotely and be monitored from his lab.

Nikola didn’t answer, his eyes flicking back and forth between John and Jack.

“Jealous?” Jack asked, taunting Nikola with a grin, sliding closer to John on the bed.

John gave Jack a tolerant sideways glance.

Nikola made a little moue of distaste with his lips. “John, I require your assistance,” he said quickly, turning around.

Jack laughed lasciviously as John followed Nikola out of the room.

Out in the hallway, John waited for a minute as Nikola paced back and forth between the window and the place where the hall turned into the doorway to Jack’s room. Then he prompted Nikola. “Yes?”

“What?” Nikola said, looking up, but still pacing.

“You require my assistance?” John said, waiting.

“Oh, right,” Nikola said, and he stared on the window for a moment at one end of the hallway. John had no doubt that Nikola had no particular need of him and had only desired to remove him from Jack’s company. But when Nikola announced that they were out of wine, John tipped his head gravely and left to run errands without complaint.


	2. Chapter 2

It weren’t as though the others gave up the search for Jack, exactly. But it was more that after two weeks they had no particular leads to follow up on Jack’s disappearance and the other things in the normal life of the Sanctuary began to interfere. The abnormals in residence still needed care and counseling, the abnormals turning up in the city often needed relocating. Visitors could not be postponed forever due to one mystery not yet solved.

“He did just turn up out of nowhere,” Helen said to Ianto one evening, after yet another lead had turned out to be a dead end. “It’s possible he simply returned to where he came from.” Ianto had managed to nod evenly in response, but he didn’t believe it. From what Jack had told him, the place where he came from held nothing for him; there was no one there with any claim to him or any hope for him, and Ianto couldn’t imagine that Jack would have returned there without warning.

Jack had been happy in Old City, in the Sanctuary, with Ianto. He’d told Ianto as much. He told Ianto all sorts of things, at night. Jack didn’t need to sleep, and Ianto would drift into dreams to the sound of Jack’s voice murmuring about how this was how life had always been meant to be and would rouse in the middle of the night to sleepily hear Jack in the middle of a story about Ianto’s bravery and something about cannibals, and in the morning he would wake and Jack would still be there, smiling gently at him, and Jack would tell him he was beautiful, and that it was time for another beautiful new day, and Ianto would stare at him blearily and tell Jack that Jack was only being sweet because he wanted Ianto to get up to make the coffee, and Jack would not deny that this was the truth.

It was easy for Jack’s other world to seem very far away from Helen, and even from Ianto, but Ianto knew that it was not at all far away from Jack, and that he carried it with him inside, even now. Ianto could sense that much of what Jack said and did in this world was due to that other world and reasons that Ianto would never understand. He could sense that Jack’s feelings for him were not really for him—that they were for the other Ianto, the dead Ianto—but he was lonely enough that filling a dead man’s place seemed better than nothing. There were worse things than being the dead man’s replacement. It was as though he had already lived one lifetime with Jack, in which Jack had made all of his mistakes, and Ianto was living the second lifetime now, where Jack was determined to make up for all of them.

Jack had talked frequently of the future, but not as though he expected their circumstances to change. He’d talk about planting a potted garden on Ianto’s small balcony off his flat, or about taking Ianto to see Cairo and Perth and Rio de Janeiro. He suggested improvements to the Sanctuary that would take years to implement but didn’t seem put off by the timeline or the long-term commitment. When Ianto had cautiously broached the topic of children—just for someday, mind—Jack had smiled with a tired look in his eye and told Ianto that they had plenty of time. He was settled into this world.

So Ianto did not think that he had simply returned to where he came from.

Jack had arrived in this universe with only what was carrying on him, and the only thing that he had come with that he had not been wearing at the time he went missing was a pair of navy blue braces and a tarnished gold stopwatch. The braces had a tear from an encounter with a [name of abnormal]. One of the nesting young had taken a shine to Jack and clung fiercely to his shoulder and refused to be parted from him. Ianto had intended to throw the ripped braces in the rubbish bin, but after Jack went missing he suddenly couldn’t bear to part with them. But they were nothing remarkable.

The stopwatch was more notable. It seemed old, and was engraved on the inside of the face. Ianto would hold it at night and in the absence of Jack’s voice the quiet ticking sound was comforting to him. But no matter how many hours he lay awake at night listening to the stopwatch, inspiration failed him. He knew Jack was missing but had no idea how to find him, and he couldn’t help but feel that he was failing Jack. That the other Ianto, who was brave and strong and dead because of it, would have known what to do even as he sat there helpless.

And then Jack called him.

Ianto routinely answered the phone at the Sanctuary; it was one of his primary duties, as the phone rang even more frequently than the doorbell, which he also answered. So he didn’t suspect anything when the receiver rang, and he picked it up and answered, “Ianto Jones.”

“Ianto,” Jack said, and Ianto could tell it was Jack just from that, from the peculiar way Jack said those two syllables, Yan-toe. “I don’t have long,” Jack continued, “because they’re going to find me and take me back, but you have to tell Helen, they’re keeping me somewhere in South America, I think maybe Ecuador…”

The phone line cut out for a moment, and Ianto clutched the receiver with both hands, as though if he held on to it strongly enough he would be able to hear Jack more clearly.

Jack’s voice cut back in, “Their names are John and I think Nicholas, they’re using me for some sort of genetic experiment, or breeding, or whatever. I can’t figure it out, exactly—”

Ianto waited, still clutching the receiver with both hands for the line to cut back in, for Jack to continue—but after a moment he heard the dial tone, and he realized Jack wasn’t going to say any more. He carefully set the phone back on the stand, as though the phone itself were his connection with Jack, and then he stood up so quickly he knocked his chair over backwards, and he ran down the hall to Helen’s lab.

He knocked on Henry’s door on his way, and told Henry to trace the call that had just come in to his desk, and that he was going to find Helen, and Henry shouted an acknowledgement even as Ianto was halfway down the hall. Helen was sitting at her desk with a sheaf of papers, and she looked up when Ianto burst into the room suddenly without even knocking.

“I’ve found Jack,” Ianto said.

***

Henry was able to trace the phone call as originating in Cuenca, Ecuador, but as soon as Helen heard that Jack had said the kidnappers’ names were John and Nicholas, she said it didn’t matter, as they likely were long gone already. Ianto continued his account of what Jack had said about them taking him for some sort of genetic experiment or something, and Helen only nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “that sounds exactly like Nikola.”

“Would Druitt help him out, though?” Henry questioned. “I know he’s caused you problems in the past, but kidnapping a Sanctuary operative doesn’t seem to match his recent style.

“The man can never be trusted,” Helen said firmly. “Neither of them can, they’re both unstable and too powerful for their own good.”

Will came into the room and asked what was going on.

“Jack’s contacted Ianto,” Helen informed him. “He’s been taken captive by Nikola and John for some sort of experiment that Nikola’s doing.”

“We have to help him,” Will said.

“Obviously,” Helen agreed, “but it’s much easier said than done. Thanks to John’s abilities, they could be anywhere in the world by this point, and it won’t be easy to take either of them by surprise. Knowing Nikola, there’s no telling what they’ve done to Jack or in what condition he might be in when we locate him.”

“Well, what can we do?” Will asked reasonably. Ianto wanted to shout at him that this was not a time to be reasonable, but he managed to hold his tongue.

“Henry,” Helen started, “I have a list of locations in the database of known hideouts that Nikola has frequented over the years. Can you pull that up?”

Henry began typing. Helen bit her thumb as she thought. A few minutes later, a list of addresses appeared on the large projection screen next to a map with flashing pins.

Cuenca was one of them. “Send a team from the Sanctuary in Salvador to check out the location from which we received the call,” Helen decided, “but let’s assume that they will have moved on as soon as they recovered Jack, and let’s assume that the call was terminated because they managed to find him. She turned her head toward Henry. “Take that one off the list.”

She ruled out three of the other hideouts because the records showed they weren’t large enough for a proper lab, or because local uprisings and political instability would have made for inconsistent electricity, which she claimed Nikola would never tolerate in the twenty-first century.

Jack had told Ianto that the twenty-first century was when everything happened. Ianto wondered nervously what he meant by that.

“That still leaves four possibilities,” Will pointed out. “That’s a lot to search.”

“Yes, and if they are still active hideouts for Nikola, then he’ll be alerted if we search any one of them.”

“Don’t they already know that we’re looking for Jack?” Henry asked. “They know he managed to call someone.”

“Perhaps,” Helen acknowledged, “but if we retain any element of surprise it will be ruined by choosing the wrong location. And it might not be any one of these locations,” she continued. “I’m sure that Nikola has hideouts that he’s managed to keep secret from me.”

Will and Helen continued to discuss the options for the search. Henry contacted the team in Salvador and did another trace on the call Jack had managed to get in to them. Then Henry and Helen began to talk tactics as they settled on the idea of searching the location in Bulgaria first, and Will turned to Ianto.

“We do have to consider the possibility that it’s a trap,” Will said, sounding almost apologetic.

Ianto nodded dumbly.

“It’s possible that Jack could have drawn the names of John and Nicholas from our archives somewhere, and the hint of a genetics experiment gone awry would be exactly the type of thing to draw Helen’s attention,” Will added.

“That doesn’t mean that we don’t have to investigate,” Helen said, putting what Ianto supposed was meant to be a soothing hand on his shoulder.

“We just have to be cautious about it,” Will said.

“Of course,” Ianto agreed, and he left Helen’s office to fetch coffee.

***

Nikola’s jealousy aside, even after Jack’s escape and their relocation to another of Nikola’s hideaways, John continued to visit Jack’s room. Nikola complained frequently of the setback of their move to his monitor and equipment readiness, and spent a great deal of time tinkering with his new laboratory set up. John looked in on him occasionally, and would find him holding a screwdriver or—on one notable occasion, a blowtorch and welding equipment—something, and distractedly muttering to himself as he would tweak something with the equipment, move over to his monitor screens to observe something in the display, and then mutter more to himself and turn back to the equipment to tweak something else.

So John would visit Jack’s room, sometimes to play cards, sometimes to talk, and sometimes to just sit, because there were times when the only thing to do was just to sit, and sometimes it was better to do that with another person than by yourself. Jack liked to play cards—he knew many cards games, and some that John had never even heard of and did not even recognize the language of the name of the game. And Jack liked to talk (he liked to talk more than he liked to listen, in fact) and Jack liked to sit. Jack seemed to like to sit with another person more than he liked to sit by himself, even.

One day they were sitting, and John was thinking simultaneously about nothing and about clouds and about Helen, and then Jack heaved a sigh and said, “Sometimes I don’t know how to live with it all.”

John turned his head toward Jack to acknowledge that he was listening.

“Yet you go on,” John observed.

“Well, I haven’t really got much choice,” Jack said evenly. “I’d much rather die than go on, much of the time,” Jack said, “But I suppose it’s just as well that it isn’t really up to me, because since I have to go on anyway, I do, and then eventually I find another moment, another reason, and I think that it is just as well after all that I am still here, because there is something to feel joy about or appreciate or do that’s worthwhile. And then more time passes, and the joy is gone and the appreciation is over and what seemed worthwhile turned out to have been wrong or futile or hopeless, and I’m back again wondering how to live with it all.” Jack sighed again.

John thought about nothing and about clouds and about Helen. “Yes,” he acknowledged. There was silence for a few moments. “Sometimes,” John said, “sometimes I look at everything there is in the world,” he gestured slightly with his hand, meaning to indicate not just the sparsely furnished cell—in the new hideaway Jack’s room had both a chair and a bed but not much else—but the world beyond it, with it’s crashing waterfalls and street corners where hundreds of people passed every minute and fields of flowers that looked as though no man had ever touched them and ever would. “And I think,” John continued, “that with all of that, how can I ponder what I have done myself, and how can what I have done myself really matter at all. I think to myself, how selfish it is to even think on myself as though what I have done has made a difference or merits contemplation.”

Jack was staring at his hands clasped in his lap and appeared to be giving John’s words a great deal of contemplation.

“But then other times, I can think of nothing else than what I’ve done,” John said. “And I think of it, and I think that it’s right that I can think of nothing else, for what right do I have to think of anything else? Do I deserve any more than to think on the acts that I’ve committed? Isn’t that part of justice, to continue to know what I have done and to think on it, even as everything else in the world persists?”

John let his own hand, which he had been using to gesture, fall into his own lap, and fell silent.

Jack nodded after a moment, and nodded slowly, agreeing. John and Jack talked a great deal on what they had each done in their lives without ever touching on what they had each done in their lives, which was both irrelevant and far too personal for their present relationship.

Jack took up the philosophizing strain. “I used to think that there was someone out there who could fix me, a doctor,” he told John. “The doctor.” John nodded again to show that he followed, and also that he agreed, because there was a doctor about whom he had felt thusly in his own life. “I spent so many years searching for him, waiting for him,” Jack continued, “and I wanted him to fix me so badly, and to take me away with him again, and so many nights that was all I could think of, and other nights the only reason I wasn’t thinking of it was because I had drank so much I was unconscious or dead or somewhere in between and thinking of nothing at all.” John and Jack really had many things in common between them. But Jack was still speaking. “And when I finally found him, my doctor, he told me he couldn’t fix me after all. Which I suppose I had sort of known all along, but it was all I had, waiting for him, so I had to keep doing it. And then after he told me he couldn’t fix me, he asked me to come with him, but I realized that all the while I had been waiting for him, I had had something better with me at home, that I hadn’t appreciated. That I had people who depended on me, who missed me, who were waiting for me instead of me waiting for them, and I went back to them, instead.” Jack used his free hand to turn to the table next to his bed, and took a drink from the glass of water had sitting there. “Unfixed,” Jack finished his thought.

“And what happened,” John prompted, staring at the wall across from Jack’s chair. Nikola’s wallpaper was peeling.

“I had them for a while and then I lost them,” Jack said willingly enough.

“Nothing is forever,” John said without thinking. But Jack scoffed.

“Too many things are forever,” Jack contradicted him. “But all the wrong things.” And John supposed that Jack really was right about that.

John was in charge of food. Nikola wasn’t really good at food. He didn’t eat humans (or so he told Helen, at least), but he didn’t eat human food, either. He drank a great deal of wine but it never seemed to affect him, or not in the manner it would affect a human who drank that quantity of wine, at least.

John was by no means a culinary expert, but he did at least eat, which meant he was better suited to the task of feeding their prisoner than Nikola was. He located a small restaurant near to where they were living, and managed to make himself understood to the proprietor in a mangled mess of French and German, and then he showed up once a day and the cook gave him a bag of pastries and containers of stew and casserole and potatoes and breads. The cook even seemed to enjoy putting together the package for John and “Mr. Nicholas,” as they knew his companion, and John tipped them well to thank them and smiled politely when he picked up the packages.

“Mr. Nicholas” was of course not the one consuming the meals with John, but that was of no concern to the cook, John thought. Nikola had been concerned that Jack might refuse to eat in an attempt to interfere with Nikola’s experiment, and had arranged elaborate plans for how they might have to force feed him, or nourish him through medical means, but none of that had come to be necessary. John arrived once a day with food, and Jack ate it. John arrived again later in the day with leftovers he had warmed in the kitchen, and Jack ate once again. On his own, John would likely not have bothered with anything more, but he saw how eagerly Jack dug into the food which he brought, and he started to look for more, to bring him packages of biscuits to keep in his room and snack on, or to stop at the supermarket for milk and cereal and fruit and carrots. He brought Jack extra boxes of crackers and pretzels and so forth that he could keep to snack on even when John wasn’t around, and just in case John was unable to come by one day with the usual hot meals.

He brought Jack other things, as well. Puzzles to work on during the empty hours of the day, a novel and a magazine. The novel was in English and the magazine was in Russian and he noticed that Jack read both. He brought Jack an extra blanket and a second pillow, because he noticed that this lodging was colder than their previous one, which was to John’s tastes but not to Jack’s. And he thought Jack appreciated this, but it was hard to know precisely, because even when John wasn’t consciously thinking about it, Jack was actually his prisoner. John may have forgotten about that fact for a minute or an hour or a day, but Jack clearly didn’t forget about it, because one evening when John was returning with his heavy brown sack full of food, he heard Nikola shout suddenly, “John!” with urgency in his tone, and John dropped the back of food and materialized into Nikola’s lab, narrowly missing materializing into Nikola himself, which Nikola would not have appreciated happening again.

But Nikola was too concerned to be angry with John’s near miss, and he pointed on one of his monitors, which showed the door to Jack’s room wide open, and the chain that usually kept Jack chained to the wall hanging empty, and showed Jack working quickly on the electronic lock that kept the rear gate sealed. John put a hand on Nikola’s shoulder and pulled them both out to the back garden next to the rear gate.

Nikola had shifted forms, as he did when he was frightened or—more likely in this case—angry, and he hissed at Jack when they appeared. Jack was already turning from seeming to sense someone suddenly behind him, and he jumped and then raised his hands disarmingly.

“That’s quite a trick you have there,” he said to Nikola, flicking his eyes quickly between Nikola and John and back to Nikola, lingering on his blackened eyes and teeth. He raised his hands a little further. “You can hardly blame a guy for trying to escape.”

Nikola hissed at him again, and Jack shot a nervous look at John, who looked back at him impassively. Then Nikola seemed to shake off his vampire face and put his hand back on John’s arm and looked at John peremptorily. John put his other hand on Jack’s arm and took the three of them back into Jack’s room.

Jack turned his head around wildly, taking in his sudden change in circumstances, while Nikola stalked over to the wall and inspected the lock Jack had managed to pick. He dragged Jack across the room—Jack seemed somewhat startled by the inhuman strength in Nikola’s frame, though by this point he should have realized that Nikola was not in fact entirely human. Nikola locked him up again and gave John an eloquent glare as he held up a paperclip that must have come with one of the papers that John had brought into the room. John shrugged an apology. Nikola cleared everything out of the rest of the room, packing up everything in one of the blankets and shaking out the others for things that might be hiding before clearing the blanket full of stuff out of the room with him. He gestured for John to follow him out into the hall, and John did. Nikola secured the lock on the room, and then with a spark of blue lightening he did something else to the lock that John hadn’t seen him do before. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he could make a guess that the lock wasn’t going to open again for him easily.

“I think,” Nikola told John in an overly calm voice, “that you have perhaps become too friendly with our guest, who, if you’ll recall, is only here for the purposes of my experiment.”

It seemed that John was cursed to spend his life surrounded by high-strung scientists and their experiments.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he acknowledged smoothly.

“I’m sure you’ll understand that I’ll have to make arrangements,” Nikola said, looking slightly placated.

“Of course,” John soothed him further, and after a few further exchanges, Nikola waved a dismissive hand at John and he was able to escape, even if Jack was still caught in the middle of Nikola’s latest game.

***

Their planning was comprehensive and sound, whatever it had involved. Helen had a syringe held at John’s throat before he had a chance to dematerialize. “Don’t even think about moving,” she told him, but John did attempt to move slightly, and Helen had not been exaggerating, because she injected him. It was the same drug she’d given him previously, but the fact that he had recovered from the drug once before was little consolation when he was writhing in pain again.

John was incapacitated and incapable of trying to see what was happening to Nikola, but Helen’s plan must have accounted for Nikola as well, because after a few minutes one of her associates came through the door, followed by Nikola, who was wearing some sort of metal collar that John had never seen him with before. Judging by the way Nikola was pulling at it with his hands, it was some part of Helen’s plan.

Her associate threw Nikola over next to where John was still writhing on the floor and Helen stood over both of them.

Henry came out of Jack’s room. “I’ve got him,” Henry announced.

“Good,” Helen said shortly. “Jack, do you need immediate medical assistance?” her eyes inspected him quickly, lingering on his abdomen, where Nikola’s incubating experiment was now rather visible.

Jack shook his head in a negative and was taking advantage of being loose from his bindings to stretch his arms and his back. “Hardly the worst captors I’ve had,” Jack said, smiling. “Not that I don’t appreciate the rescue.”

“The point is that a rescue shouldn’t have been necessary,” Helen interrupted. “I can’t—no,” she corrected herself, “I can believe it. But I wish that I couldn’t believe that the two of you would do something like this; sadly I find the two of you all too believable. But this is ridiculous!” She turned toward Nikola. “Cloning altered human DNA samples? Have you no sense of ethics whatsoever?”

“You put me in a collar,” Nikola objected with great dignity.

“That’s the least of your problems,” Helen told him. She turned toward John. “And you—have you gone so far that you couldn’t recognize how foolish of an idea this was?”

John was still moaning in pain on the ground and didn’t feel compelled to answer that question.

Helen lectured them for a while longer while John lost track of time, as the pain wracked through his body in waves. After Helen ran out of breath with which to berate the two of them, she stuck them both back in what they had been using as Jack’s room and locked the door with two of her associates left to guard it under strict orders to shoot both of them if even one of them did anything suspicious. John wondered absently if Nikola’s modifications to the lock would still allow them to get out.

He couldn’t think very well, though. Nikola occupied himself first with trying to pry the collar off of his neck, without success, and once he had exhausted his curiosity attempting to solve his own problem, turned his attention to John.

“What did she do to you?” Nikola asked John.

“Poison,” John got out.

“The same as the last time?” Nikola asked him, and John managed a nod through his grimace, and then suddenly Nikola had extended an elegant lengthened vampire nail, made a delicate cut in his own wrist, and held it to John. “Here.”

“Blood?” John managed, skeptically.

“Well, I’m sorry I hardly have the equipment to make it into a palatable potion for you in this cell,” Nikola said sarcastically, “But I assure you, this is the active ingredient, and if it’s the same as what Helen did to you the last time, this will cure your ailment.”

John couldn’t entirely follow Nikola’s ramblings, but he grasped the gist of what he was saying and was in too much pain to care much more than that. He sucked willingly at Nikola’s wrist, which Nikola permitted for a long moment before drawing his hand away. John licked his lips, swallowed again, and waiting, praying for something to take effect.

It left slowly, in a gradual lessening of the tremors and waves of pain, but after long minutes of careful breathing, John found himself able to think again. A few moments later, he even dared to sit up, leaning heavily against the wall behind him. Nikola regarded him with mild curiosity. “See?” Nikola said, as though John had doubted him.

“Thank you,” John said hoarsely.

Nikola merely sniffed and inspected the now completely healed cut on his wrist.

After a moment, Nikola said, “Is there a clasp on this in the back?” gesturing to the collar.

John sat up further, and inspected it closely. “Yes,” he answered. “It requires a key.”

“Figures,” Nikola said, pouting.

***

Ianto wasn’t present for the actual raid of John and Nikola’s hideout, but once Will and Henry and Helen had secured the location, he joined them on site. He managed to refrain from running to Jack as soon as he saw him, but it was irrelevant, really, because as soon as Jack saw him, Jack was running to Ianto.

Helen had examined Jack already, Jack reported, and he was in satisfactory healthy despite the fact that Nikola had decided to use him as a human Petrie dish.

“And we can resolve that soon enough,” Helen assured Jack and Ianto. “Once we’re back at the Sanctuary, the surgery to remove the parasite shouldn’t be too invasive, and with your accelerated healing you’ll be back to normal in no time.”

“You may want to reconsider that,” Nikola’s voice interjected, and Helen swung around, raising her weapon. Nikola raised his hands disarmingly. “Relax, I’m not armed,” he assured her.

“Don’t come any farther,” Helen told him, ordering Nikola to stop moving. “Why have you left the cell? What happened to Henry?”

“He’s fine,” Nikola said dismissively, and Helen hefted her little weapon higher with a bit more emphasis. Nikola raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t come any closer. Ianto took a nervous step closer to Jack, who took his hand and squeezed it encouragingly. “But I do think you may want to reconsider your plan to terminate my experiment.”

“And why is that?” Helen asked Nikola, her voice hard.

Nikola gestured toward Jack’s stomach. “Because that’s your daughter.”

***

John was just as glad he hadn’t followed Nikola out of Jack’s room when Nikola managed to manipulate the lock on the door, because he still overheard Helen’s reaction to Nikola’s announcement about exactly whose DNA he had been using for his genetic hybrid experiments, even within Jack’s cell.

Helen was obviously not pleased. To say she was displeased was in fact a grand understatement. John decided to remain in Jack’s old room and avoid reminding Helen of the circumstances of her last offspring. Nikola was going to be on his own for this one. John listened to them from Jack’s room.

“Explain,” Helen told Nikola, her voice growing more furious by the second.

“Well, you see,” Nikola’s voice had taken on a lecturing tone. “When I began to consider the situation of my future progeny, and what I owed to the world in a legacy, I had to assess the situation and measure how I could leave my progeny with the greatest possible genetic advantage.”

John could imagine the look on Helen’s face right now but had no desire to see it. Nikola seemed oblivious, if his blather was any indication.

“And the progeny of two source blood enriched immortals has genetic advantages not available to the population at large, as we know from recent experience. So that seemed the natural choice. Of course I added a few modifications of my own devising,” Nikola continued.

“Modifications,” Helen said, her voice icy.

“Only to give the offspring the greatest possible advantage,” Nikola said.

There was a moment of silence in the hallway during which John heard nothing.

“I should have killed you years ago.” Helen said finally.

“Now, now,” Nikola’s voice took on a placating tone. “Is that any way to speak to the father of your child?”

“It seems to be the only way to speak to him,” Helen told him. “I ought to have killed him, too. I let my sentiment for the two of you blind me to what ought to have been done years ago.”

The door to Jack’s room suddenly opened, and Helen was in the doorway. John gazed at the floor and didn’t meet her eyes. “Get in,” Helen told Nikola, who entered the room and flinched only slightly when Helen slammed the door behind him.

“That went well,” John said mildly.

Nikola looked only slightly put out. “She doesn’t realize what I’ve done,” he insisted.

“Oh, I suspect she does,” John said.

“If she would only stop being so emotional about it and consider the situation objectively,” Nikola continued, without paying any mind to John’s response. “Then she could appreciate the scope of this achievement purely in the realm of science. No one has ever even been close to achieving something of this magnitude before! The modifications that the cabal managed to make to Ashley may have given me the idea, of course,” Nikola said dismissively, “but the principle that underlay this work remained my own and ought to be recognized.”

John closed his eyes and tilted his neck so his head rested back against the wall.

Nikola paced for a few minutes, and then John felt the air move next to him and Nikola sat down next to him with a huff. He fidgeted for a few moments before turning to John and speaking. “Do you suppose she will really try to kill us?”

John shrugged without opening his eyes. “Perhaps,” he acknowledged.

“Is it truly possible?” Nikola seemed to have the slightest thread of worry spreading through him for the first time in this whole affair. “I’ve theorized about what might do it, of course, perhaps something like Geoffrey’s electromagnetic tunnel on a grander scale of course, but even that, it might still simply be a question of time spent in recovery, and not an actual termination of being in the sense that Helen seems to intend.”

John interrupted Nikola’s ramblings, because Nikola could go on in that fashion forever. “I think the question, Nikola,” he said, opening his eyes to find Nikola watching him curiously, “is not whether or not Helen could possibly find a way to ‘terminate our being,’ but whether or not she could conceive of something worse to do to us if she cannot.”

Nikola seemed to take that in.

“It may in fact be,” John continued, “that death would be preferable.”

Nikola nodded after a moment. “Yes,” he acknowledged. “You may be correct.”

And after that they sat together in silence.

***

There were very limited kitchen facilities at Nikola’s hideout location, and Ianto assumed, as he scrounged around the kitchen and tried to find a coffee filter to at least be able to brew a carafe, that John and Nikola and Jack had to be ordering food in. There wasn’t enough food in the kitchen for them to have been doing their own cooking, even assuming that Nikola or John had greater skill in that area than Jack, and even if the skill were present the kitchen seemed to be lacking necessary utensils and equipment. He found a dusty stack of coffee filters at the back of a cupboard filled otherwise entirely with wine bottles and added it to the tiny appliance and flipped the switch, listening to the reassuring noise of the heating water, steam, and coffee as it dripped reassuringly into the carafe.

He zoned out slightly as the coffee carafe filled half full with the brown fluid, and then he roused himself and continued searching the kitchen for the other things he would need—cups, dish soap, a sponge to wash out all the cups. They were all dusty and one of the mugs he found had a dead spider at the bottom. Ianto planned to save that one for Will.

At some point, someone came in the kitchen behind him. Ianto started suddenly when Jack put his arms around Ianto’s waist.

“I’ve missed you,” Jack said, nosing at Ianto’s neck. Ianto consciously let the tension bleed out of his body and relaxed into Jack’s embrace. Jack always smelled so good.

“I’ve missed you as well,” Ianto said softly after a moment. Leaning into Jack’s body felt a little different with the distortion of Jack’s abdomen between the two of them. “Are you all right?” Ianto asked him.

Jack gave a little laugh. “I’ve had better and worse years,” he offered. “But I’m doing much better since you showed up.”

Ianto understood intellectually that Jack was from an alternate universe, and that, even more foreign than the alternate universe, he was from another planet and another millennium within that alternate universe. And these things meant that some things that Ianto would have struggled with—such as the idea of a man bearing children—were things that Jack took for granted. But understanding such things in an intellectual manner did not truly help Ianto deal with such things in a practical manner, such as when his boyfriend was kidnapped, disappeared for four months, and then was turned up pregnant.

“Are you going to have a baby?” Ianto asked bluntly.

Jack took one of Ianto’s hands and placed it gently around the curve of his stomach. “It seems like it,” he agreed.

“And you’ve done this before?” Ianto asked, trying to follow while simultaneously trying to not remind Jack too frequently that he was not in fact the Ianto that Jack had used to know.

“Had children?” Jack clarified. “Yes,” he agreed. “Well, in both senses. I birthed a child once—and didn’t ever plan to do that again,” he said, “but that shows how much a plan counts for. And then I’ve fathered other children but not birthed them myself, if that makes sense as well.” His face seemed a little bit darker as he mentioned that and Ianto didn’t push.

***

Nikola was never very good at silence, so John wasn’t surprised that their quiet time together didn’t last very long before Nikola broke it.

“So,” Nikola started, and he seemed to be waiting for some sort of acknowledgement from John. After a moment, John deigned to open his eyes. “If Helen is going to kill us anyway,” Nikola continued, “Can I bite you first?”

John blinked.

“It’s just,” Nikola explained, “I never have, and I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like, and now the worry that Helen would kill me if she knew I was drinking human blood is beginning to seem irrelevant, so…” he trailed off and seemed to be waiting for a response from John.

“You’ve never?” John questioned, because he wasn’t entirely sure that he believed that.

“Never,” Nikola replied, with what seemed like exaggerated sincerity, and John still wasn’t sure if he trusted that to be the truth. Then he considered whether or not it was the truth mattered to the content of his reply.

“No,” John said.

“No?” Nikola sounded appalled. “You’d deny a dying man his final wish?”

“You’re the reason that I’m involved in this whole mess in the first place,” John said, firmly, but without rancor. “I don’t owe you anything,” he insisted to Nikola.

Nikola pouted for a bit, peeved about this denial. John closed his eyes again and resumed waiting in silence.

Closing his eyes was a mistake, however, because it meant that Nikola had a millisecond advantage after he decided he didn’t care about John’s consent in fulfilling his final request, and changed into his vampire form and leaned into John’s neck.

He couldn’t dematerialize with the shields Helen had installed, but he could still move quickly, and did, shifting down the wall away from Nikola’s neck and wrapping one hand into Nikola’s hair in a fierce grab to keep his teeth away.

“Nikola,” he growled, warning.

“I’ve decided I don’t care about you or Helen or anyone,” Nikola told him, flashing black eyes at John.  
Nikola’s collar kept him from shocking John, but it didn’t keep him from scratching at John with extended fingernails, and even John could smell the blood on the air as their match devolved into wrestling on the stone floor.

In the end, John managed to keep Nikola from biting him, and he permitted Nikola to lick at a scratch Nikola made up John’s forearm instead. It wasn’t unpleasant. His lips were warm, and soft, and he seemed to be enjoying the experience a great deal in a way that was vaguely flattering to John.

***

Nikola was—unsurprisingly—not all that interested in the child once born. He spent several days establishing baseline measurement and essentially confirming the success of his experiment without seemingly even realizing, much less acknowledging, that this was a new life and a complete new person.

Once his scientific curiosity was satisfied, he spent another few days scientifically analyzing the personality of the baby—attempting to put reasons to why she cried and when, to what the cadence of her cry was and the tone. He tested her vision and her hearing and her sensitivity to EM frequencies.

John simply watched and tried not to exert any influence over the child. He didn’t say anything. He watched Jack hold the baby easily and hum to her to get her to calm, he watched Helen’s nervous and tentative involvement. Jack’s parenting skills were somehow both the most surprising—given his participation in the entire event—and also the least surprising, somehow. There was something resilient about Jack that John worried that he himself, Nikola, and Helen all lacked.

During the third week, Jack was holding the baby and playing a game with her that seemed to involve moving his face very close to hers and then backing up again. Nikola seemed to have run out of things to measure, observe, record and review. He hovered, instead, acting as though Jack and the child were some sort of mild curiosity, and eventually Jack rolled his eyes at Nikola’s hovering and positioned Nikola’s arms and put the child in them, not listening to any of Nikola’s protests.

“But,” Nikola was still saying as Jack took his hands away. He looked like he wanted to give the baby back but was actually too afraid to move. John fought back a smile at Nikola’s predicament. Jack appeared to have no sympathy.

“You’re fine,” he told Nikola.

“You can take her back now,” Nikola told him.

“Why don’t you hold her a bit longer,” Jack said, “and think about what to name her.”

“Name her?” Nikola asked.

“You’re the father, aren’t you? Isn’t it your responsibility?” Jack asked mildly.

“I sort of think of you as the father, actually,” Nikola said under his breath, and John wasn’t sure if Jack heard him or not.

“I’m kind of partial to Rose,” Jack offered, “if you want my opinion.”

Nikola tilted his head to one side as he considered Jack’s suggestion. “What about Julia?” he asked John.

John shrugged impassively. The child wasn’t his.

“Julia Rose?” Jack asked. “I like it.” He started humming a song to the child in Nikola’s arms.


End file.
